4/23/2009 @ 6:00AM

Most Valuable U.S. Coins

As the federal government prints billions of dollars to prop up a sagging economy, some worry that a dollar just isn’t worth anything these days. They’ve probably never seen an 1804 Silver Dollar.

A specimen in good condition is worth $10 million, making it America’s most valuable coin. With only 19 copies known to exist, it’s also the envy of numismatists across the country.

“The major collectors who don’t have one just sort of put their heads down,” says John Albanese, president and founder of Certified Acceptance Corp., under whose auspices he has bought and sold more than 20 seven-figure coins.

The 1804 Silver Dollar is one of four coins worth more than $5 million in good condition. The star-crossed 1933 Double Eagle is second on the list at $8.5 million, followed by the 1913 Liberty Nickel at $5.9 million–bizarrely, one of the only legal coins ever produced without the knowledge of the U.S. Mint. Rounding out the top five is the $4.4 million 1861 Double Eagle, of which only two examples are known to exist.

Behind the Numbers

Our values of these rare coins are courtesy of Nostomania.com, a collectibles evaluator run by software developers and engineers that generates pricing data by processing actual-sales figures through a set of proprietary algorithms. These are theoretical values–they assume that each coin has a grade of MS-63 (on a 1-70 scale), numismatic lingo for very good condition. Some of these coins are not known to exist in this precise condition, but this is the only way to make an apples-to-apples comparison.

With the stock market tanking, many high-net-worth investors have started paying attention to rare coins because they have some degree of inherent value. David Albanese, president of coin dealer Albanese Rare Coins (no relation to John Albanese) estimates that rare coin values are up by almost 25% over the past year.

“If you buy $1 million worth of stocks, it could go down to $20,000,” he says. “That just doesn’t happen with coins. They really are artifacts, and there are a finite number of the rare ones left.”

Catch Me If You Can

The stories behind the coins often contribute to their value–but can also be their undoing.

The aforementioned 1933 Double Eagle, for example, is perhaps the rarest and most famous coin. As a result of a bizarre series of events that started unfolding nearly a century ago, there is only one in existence that’s legal to own.

Shortly after the coins were minted, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order outlawing the circulation and possession of gold currency in an attempt to stabilize the country’s teetering bank system. As legend has it, a U.S. Mint cashier by the name of George McCann smuggled out a handful of the coins before they could be destroyed.

The government discovered this in 1944, and the Secret Service immediately embarked on a quest to hunt down the missing coins. However, shortly before the search began, Egyptian King Farouk acquired a Double Eagle and applied for a license to own it. Government officials unknowingly accepted his application, and the coin was pronounced legal to own. When Farouk was deposed in 1952, the coin went missing again.

Four decades later, a British coin dealer named Stephen Fenton was found in possession of what he claimed was King Farouk’s coin during a sting operation in New York. As part of a settlement, he agreed to sell it in an open auction, and the record $7.6 million it fetched from an anonymous buyer in 2002 was split between Fenton and the U.S. government. Leading up to the auction, the coin was stored in a safe at the World Trade Center, then transferred to Fort Knox just months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In 2003, there was another twist in the saga: A woman from Philadelphia named Joan Langbord discovered 10 Double Eagles in a safe deposit box belonging to her late father, Israel “Izzy” Switt, a jeweler long linked to rumored coin-pilferer McCann’s stash. A year later Langbord handed the Double Eagles over to the U.S. Mint to have them certified. But the Feds confiscated the coins in 2005, claiming they were taken in an unlawful manner, and Langbord is now suing the government to have them returned. The potential flood of Double Eagles has kept the coin from ascending to the top of this list.

Still, some collectors argue that machine-generated values aren’t always accurate. John Albanese thinks the 1933 Double Eagle is worth $7.5 million–just shy of its 2002 auction price, and 12% less than Nostomania’s figure.

Albanese has also heard rumors that the “Farouk Double Eagle,” now on display at the Federal Reserve in New York isn’t actually the one that was owned by King Farouk. He says the Egyptian monarch was famous for excessively wiping down his coins, and the one in New York bears no such marks. Might the real one still be out there?